11iconWired to Work
John Fuller’s daughter is grown now, and he’s taken over her room, cluttering it with computer and boating magazines and his Heathkit micro. At first glance it looks like the computer room of any of thousands of hobbyists. You may, in fact, catch whiffs of smoke from Fuller’s soldering gun.
It’s an unlikely setting for a working office of the U.S. Navy.
And yet that’s exactly what it was when Lieutenant Commander Fuller responded to my notice on an electronic bulletin board asking if anyone at home was hooked up to his boss via computers.
“I’ve been getting away with it for six months,” Fuller drawled proudly.
On the verge of retirement from the navy, he was determined to telecommute in civilian life, too, perhaps as a management consultant, his military job. “It seems foolish for me to get in a car to go to an office,” he said, “if I can go to that office by phone. I’m much happier not having to get into traffic for forty-five minutes each morning. I can have coffee and read theWashington Post, and I’m not tense. I work fewer hours. But I don’t have five or six guys to talk to about ball scores, either. The government’s getting a better deal from me working at home.”
In fact, Electronic Services Unlimited (ESU), a research firm in New York City, found typical productivity increases between 15 and 20 percent.
So it isn’t surprising that at least 250 firms, including some big names like American Express and McDonald’s, were allowing work at home as of 1984. Many more companies might be. They might have kept quiet, however, fearing either (1) union resistance or (2) pressure from employees who wanted to telecommute before management was ready for them to do so.
“I look outside my Manhattan window and think some cities are going to be transformed—streets will be empty,”InfoWorldquoted an ESU official.
That might have been stretching it. In 1984 only several thousandpeople were full-time telecommuters on a payroll. But Jack M. Nilles, coiner of the word “telecommuting,” said the number may have reached twenty thousand if you included other people.[59]Lone individuals, stockbrokers, even a software house organized “on-line,” were trying it. And Nilles, a future studies researcher at the University of Southern California, was predicting perhaps as many as ten million wired workers by 1990. He said most of the ten million would telecommute only part time. Still, that would be a huge number, perhaps one-fifth of the information workers in the United States.
You might beat the crowd in the most obvious way—by becoming a do-it-yourself telecommuter, perhaps without even leaving your present job. “Wired to Work” will explain. You’ll also learn how your company might benefit from large-scale telecommuting. Even small firms can come out ahead. A growing translation service in Washington, D.C., squeezed into the basement of the owner’s home, lends tiny Radio Shack computers to workers.
Telecommuting may very well help your firm reduce real estate costs; hire better people, clerical and professional; and get a head start on your competitors, mixing high tech with decency and managerial common sense. No, I’m not going to suggest putting a “For Sale” sign tomorrow on your corporate skyscraper. Telecommuting isn’t for every worker or every company. American bureaucracies, however, public and private, are not yet tapping the full potential of telecommuting. As far back as 1970 Commerce Department statistics showed that half of American workers dealt in information, whether it was travel agenting, technical writing, or filling out 10K forms.
Match those statistics with Jack Nilles’s estimate that more than2.5 million nonfarmers in the United States already work at home, and you can appreciate telecommuting’s prospects.
Fuller’s case, in particular, shows how countless Americans might leap at the chance to telecommute.
His employer was a bureaucracy, a huge one, hardly a trendies’ citadel, lacking an official telecommuting program, and yet he carved out his own niche as a wired worker. The Navy allowed a few other men from his office to write and think at home. But the resourceful Fuller went a step beyond; he took the initiative of hooking himself up electronically. And he told me, “I’ll never again work where I don’t want to be.” It seemed so logical. Now that telecommuting was technologically possible, why shouldn’t employeesaskfor it? Why shouldn’t telecommuting be a grass-roots movement among professionals in large organizations, not just the province of corporate planners and rich escapees from Wall Street? Moreover, with his down-to-earth wisdom expressed plainly in a Georgia accent, John Fuller couldn’t be shrugged off as a dreamy hacker.
The purists might not have accepted Fuller into the telecommuting fold, since he was still spending at least one-quarter of his forty-hour week in other people’s offices. To me, though, he was all the better an illustration of how people and companies could gracefully change over.
As an in-house consultant, Fuller went from office to office, telling, for instance, how the Naval Academy could set up a cost-analysis formula for its laundry or how a base commander could consolidate two computer systems. His “clients” were not completely “on-line.” And he appreciated the value of face-to-face meetings where he could smooth ruffled feathers with southern humor. “I may look like another alligator,” he would tell bureaucrats intimidated by the presence of a management consultant, “and I may be taking you away from your work, but I need information from you to help you do it better.” Fuller would also stray into his boss’s office from time to time for library research and to remind people he was still breathing.
Every few days he reminded them in other, more meaningful ways. He would load up his little Heath computer with disks containing the report he was working on and a communications program. The computer would then pipe the output to his modem, which sped the results to a Wang word processor in his office—well, his former office.
A secretary would capture the information on a disk, watching in appreciation as Fuller’s work flashed across the Wang’s screen at several hundred words per minute.
“The secretaries don’t admit to being threatened,” he said.“They’re still busy transcribing the stuff the other guys bring in. And if the others were transmitting it like me, they’d still need to do the final formating, editing, the modifications required of these things.
“Besides, there’s got to be someone there who answers the phone.”
Baby-sitting a computer by the phone doesn’t sound like the most challenging task, but one day many of the secretaries themselves may work at home.
Granted, some management-level workers worry that telecommuting would lower their own job status by forcing them to work keyboards. “If I were a civilian at some companies and I sat down at a keyboard and composed my day’s work,” Fuller admitted, “a clerk or administrative-type person might complain to the personnel office that I was clerical rather than professional and should be demoted.
“As the younger generation of managers grows up with keyboards and rises higher in the power structure,” Fuller said, however, “you’ll find the stigma fading.” By century’s end, moreover, a voice-controlled computer might sell for less than $1,000. Good-bye, typing! You may still use a keyboard, actually—but just to clean up sentences where the computer confused “sleigh” with “slay” or muddled similar combinations.
Should you, then, even today, follow Fuller’s example and make yourself a telecommuter?
Consider:
1. How much public contact does your job require and in what form? And how much contact do you have with your coworkers?
Fuller didn’t need to have strangers passing through his office. His job, rather, called for him to go to “clients.” Also, he was working on his own projects, not entangled in office-wide activities, and he didn’t need constant feedback from his boss.
2. Does your job require much office politics, and how secure are you in it?
John Fuller was about to retire. Had he been a young manager fighting for a promotion, he might not have chosen to remain most of the time out of his boss’s sight. Then again, he did have the benefit of a superior more enlightened than many. His boss wanted results, not mere attendance.
Margrethe Olson, an associate professor at New York University’s business school, warns that some telecommuters may suffer at promotion time. She correctly wonders about “the long-term career potential of an employee in an environmentwhere visibility is still critical to promotability.” In a 1982 paper Olson observed: “Some form of management by objectives, either informal or formal, generally needs to replace ‘over the shoulder’ supervision, in spirit as well as in fact.” As she once said, “Culture changes more slowly than technology.”
Keep in mind the experiences of a vice-president of a New York consulting firm who telecommuted from Florida.
When theNew York Timesinterviewed him, he insisted that he remain nameless, lest the wrong people in the firm find out about the arrangement.[60]“I still think there’s a mentality around there that people who work at home are not working,” he said, adding, however:
“I like to have uninterrupted periods of work alone. If I have to stop and go to a meeting for two hours, I lose more than two hours.”
3. What becomes of the clerks and secretaries whose work your telecommuting may change or reduce?
Fuller’s “disappearance” from his regular office didn’t put anyone out on the street. It merely lightened the secretaries’ work loads.
4. How expensive, and how much trouble technically, would telecommuting be to your company and to you?
In Fuller’s case it was relatively easy. His office already had the word processor, and as a computer hobbyist he already owned the Heath micro. Ever ingenious, he devised an easy way of entering data so the Wang, which justified margins by the paragraph, could function with his home system, which did so by the line. (See BackupXI, “The Micro Connection: Some Critical Explanations,” for more tips on links between your own micro and the office’s.)
John Fuller’s electronic hookup cost next to nothing. A modem like his—the device allows a computer to talk over the phone—would sell for about $100 today. Faster modems may cost $300-$600.
It pays to check out technical specifications and shop around. The old compatibility rule applies here: don’t believe that any combinations of equipment will work together until you’ve actually tested them out. Obtain a store’s promise that you’ll win a refund if the systems won’t talk to one another electronically. You’ll also need to make sure that the computers have communications programs that functiontogether. A good communications program for a micro—one that’s easy to use and lets you store information to be transmitted—can cost less than $150. Even free software may work for you. I didn’t pay a cent for my MODEM7 program, which the writers placed in the public domain.
Normally, as a do-it-yourself telecommuter, you should favor micros over “dumb terminals.” At least make certain you can easily accumulate large masses of material to shoot out over the phone lines. That way you’ll conserve your company’s phone and computer resources. Suppose, however, that somehow they’re both unlimited and you don’t mind a phone line being tied up while you’re dumping material into the big corporate computer. Then maybe you can get away with a dumb terminal costing just a few hundred dollars.
5. How do you normally gather information in your job? By phone? By looking over written material? By tapping into your company’s computer?
If facts normally reach you by phone, you can install a special business line and tell your colleagues that, no, they won’t disturb you at home—that your work is what the line’s for.
Written material is trickier, of course. One answer may be a facsimile machine, which could cost more than your computer but may be justified if drawings are part of your work. In the future, even cheap personal computers will have attachments to scan written documents and zip the images over the phone lines. Already some expensive Wangs offer this feature.
Meanwhile, like Fuller, you may want to catch up with written material by visiting your office every few days, or you may try a formal or informal messenger service—perhaps a coworker.
If you must tap into your company’s own computer, make certain you can do so without any data-security complications. And consider how accessible your corporate data base is to begin with. Maybe there aren’t ways of conveniently plugging in—in which case you’d better rid yourself of plans for do-it-yourself telecommuting.
6. Would your family leave you alone while you telecommuted?
You must work out a deal with them that includes a place to work without interruption, rules for phone messages, and so on.
7. What about potential marital problems?
“If you work in your employer’s office, your spouse doesn’t show up very often,” says Walter I. Nissen, Jr., a programmer-consultantwho, off and on, has been telecommuting in various jobs since the late 1960s. “But if you’re home, your spouse can get angry at you, face-to-face, right there.” He finds telecommuting to be easier with his wife now working as a social worker.
8. Do you have the drive to do your job alone?
“I’m not a Theory X man,” says Fuller, referring to the school of management that says people work best with the boss peering over their shoulders.
Don’t mess with do-it-yourself telecommuting if you aren’t a self-starter—a useful trait even in corporately initiated programs. Don’t recommend it to anyone lacking this trait.
9. Can your boss measure your performance objectively? This isn’t necessary but it helps.
Michael K. Caverly, a recently retired captain and John Fuller’s former supervisor, couldn’t give any precise figures comparing the overall quality of the telecommuter’s work to earlier times. But Caverly was plainly delighted. He believes that Fuller performed better without having to worry everyday about the horrors of rush hour. “I almost feel guilty about it,” he said of Fuller’s diligence. “He would rework a problem all night long, and I’d feel almost as if I were taking advantage of him. In our office we did thirty-three studies one year, and John’s studies were the only ones that came in on time all the time.”
Jeremy Joan Hewes is also sold on telecommuting. “Can you work at home?” Hewes’s own boss asked when he hired her forPC Magazine, an independent publication for owners of the IBM PC.
“That’s where the computer is,” she replied happily.
It made sense. Hewes had her North Star micro there, after all. What’s more, she’d written a book on “worksteaders,” as she called them, and by her late thirties had worked at home most of her professional life. So why not use her North Star there and modem her stories in? She might even edit others’ articles sent over the phonelines.lines.The magazine wouldn’t have to jam another human sardine into the cramped offices it then occupied above a restaurant in northwest San Francisco. She could work better alone. The pay would be the same for her hundred hours a month. And she could enjoy tax breaks on computer equipment, supplies, even some of her rent.
The magazine, in return, ended up getting more than five thousand words a month from her, sometimes double that amount,while, at the same time, as an associate editor, she regularly oversaw at least one other writer. She also did additional work for which she was paid beyond the hundred hours.
“It’s a lot less chaotic at home,” said Hewes, who also was writing books. “I don’t have to dress up. I normally wear jeans or corduroys. I can start work at dawn in my bathrobe and answer the phone that way if it rings while I’m headed for the shower. I don’t have to drive through traffic jams every day. Or stand up for twenty minutes on a bus, hanging on for dear life to a pole, jolting along the street. I work in surroundings I’ve created.”
She created them with both the IRS and aesthetics in mind. Her apartment, near the Golden Gate Bridge, was on the second floor of a seventy-year-old house with high ceilings and leaded bay windows. A bookshelf and wooden cabinet set the computer area apart. Her keyboard and video screen were atop a custom-crafted table with fruitwood edges; she can work alongside her cocker spaniel-poodle, and through the bays she could see a doll-repair shop. It was vintage San Francisco. No matter that neighbors’ punk-rock music once besieged her ears or that practice pitchers sometimes thudded tennis balls against the house or that apartments cluttered what once were sand dunes. Several times a day she switched on her answering machine, a device she deemed necessary for worksteads. Then she’d swim laps at a nearby pool or walk her dog amid cypress and eucalyptus trees, perhaps with friends, perhaps alone, perhaps mulling over future articles forPC, where she once warned would-be telecommuters of the need for “regular breaks from the concentration of work.” At the same time she lectured herself and others on the need for self-discipline. She trained her friends to realize that she was earning a living, not goofing off—a confusion that may fade as telecommuting becomes a more mundane pursuit.
She kept her sanity and a schedule—well, a writer’s equivalent of a schedule—by remembering how she had promised to research X material by Y date and how shewouldcomplete an article on time. “I go to an editorial meeting,” she said, “and I say, ‘Here’s what I want to write for the March issue.’ They say, ‘Oh, gosh, someone else is doing that,’ or, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ or, ‘Fine, hand it in by the fifteenth.’”
“Rarely,” Hewes said of her editors, “can I imagine them calling me at eight in the morning to transmit a story in an hour.”
Mostly, in fact, she sent in her stories at night through her computer. Her IBM—she loyally bought one to replace the North Star—talked over the phone to the magazine’s machine with an automatic-answer modem. She could tell the office computer tosave her copy on a disk. Except for light editing and formating, no human normally needed to type another keystroke;PC’s computers tied in with the printer’s.
It sounds HALish, depersonalized, but like Fuller, she and others at the magazine tried to infuse their work with as much warmth as they could.
No one atPCwas leaving martinetlike orders—unaccompanied by conversation, phone or otherwise—on the green screen. And Hewes painstakingly consulted over the phone with her writers. Moreover, while Hewes worked from home at least seventy of the hundred hours, she was at thePCoffices several times a week to socialize, pick up mail, and swap ideas. And she would have come in, occasionally, anyway, even if she lived fifty miles from the magazine. (Also, she was in the field for face-to-face interviews, just as Fuller, working for the Navy, would visit his “clients.”) As the telecommuting movement grows, workers and supervisors alike should remember toseeandspeakto others, not just key to each other.
Whatever the case here, both Hewes andPCwere tickled with her telecommuting arrangement. “We’re not paying for office space, electricity, desk space,” said David H. Bunnell, then publisher and editor in chief. “She even provides her own coffee.” An office for her might have cost the equivalent of $1,200 a year. More important, however, Bunnell happily noted the thousands of words she writes for each issue: “She couldn’t be more productive, and she does her research conscientiously. Like the article she did on printers. It was obvious she’d surveyed twenty or thirty manufacturers in the field.”
Close to a year later, Hewes told me that she was no longer telecommuting regularly. Bunnell had been so happy with her work that he had appointed her editor at the book division ofPC World, which he had started after leavingPC Magazine. Hewes still loved the concept of telecommuting. But she understood its limits better. “When I was an associate editor ofPC Magazine,” she said, “I was actually more of a writer than an editor, and I didn’t have to be as much a manager as I am now. But now I have to juggle ten book projects and do budgets and go to several meetings a week. My ideal thing would be to go to the office two days a week and work at home the other three. I figure I’ll work on that for next year. Now all I’ve got to do is get everyone I need to see to come in the same two days that I do!”
Bunnell himself offers another qualification in praising telecommuting—not everyone has the needed discipline—but he says telecommuting can work especially well for people who write or sell. One New York magazine publisher, in fact, developed aspecial computer system for handicapped people, featuring written prompts to keep sales pitches consistent. And Bunnell thinks that telecommuting can work for executives, too, with the right system, taking advantage of computerized records of the words they keyed in.
Can clerical-level workers, however, also telecommute happily?
A South Carolina case illustrates both the blessings andpotentialpitfalls of telecommuting for clerical people.[61]
Blue Cross-Blue Shield there says it isn’t running an electronic sweatshop. The telecommuters’ rewards are roughly comparable to those of the regular office workers, and some cottage keyers can actually come out far ahead. The program has been going on for years. And there’s a long waiting list.
Ann Blackwell, one of the keyers, transmits her work back to Blue Cross at the crack of dawn; then she can fix breakfast for her two children and take breaks for household work and lunch. “I’d rather do this than go to the office,” she said. “I don’t have to dress. I don’t have someone looking over my shoulder all the time to see if I’m working.”
In a typical day a “cottage keyer” processes 360 claims forms from doctors. The pay is sixteen cents a claim, or $57.60 for the 360, minus a levy of $10.20 for equipment rental, meaning that the worker ends up with $47.40 before taxes.
That’s $2.18 more a day than full-time employees at Blue Cross receive for similar work, if you consider the full timers’ benefits like holidays, sick leave, vacation, and disability and health insurance. A good clerk could earn some $12,000 a year. And $12,000 is nothing to sneer at in South Carolina where many living costs are low.
However:
1. The cottage keyers are paying more than $2,600 a year to rent their machines. Doesn’t this smack of company-store tactics in a mining town? Why not finance the purchase of the worker’s own machine, which he or she might pay off in a year? Blue Cross official Tim Blackwell—who has given his company some useful feedback based on his wife’s experiences—defends the steep charge for the machines. He says it’s actually anincentive. The more a cottage keyer works and earns, the smaller will be the percentage of her income going to pay for the terminal cost.
2. The telecommuters don’t get the security that full timers do.
3. Likewise, the cottage keyers lack the normal fringe benefits. The program could delight a wife whose husband holds a steady job with good health insurance and other benefits. On the other hand, the arrangement could be bad news for a worker depending on the telecommuting for his or her main income. Significantly, women head most single-parent households.
4. The keyers may not be sharing the experiment’s rewards fifty-fifty. Excluding minor administrative expenses, the telecommuters’ services cost the firm $47.40 a day on the average, minus whatever profit the company may make off the terminals it rents to the workers. Let’s say the final expense is $45. By contrast, the regular workers costat leastat least$50.52 a day if you include vacation, fringe benefits, and the $5.30 that the firm pays for a terminal lease. Missing, however, are the expenses of office space. Also, the company’s getting slightly more work from the telecommuters with only about 12 percent as many errors!
Could an antitelecommuting backlash develop as workers catch on to the economics?
Already the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Services Employees International Union have proposed the outlawing of computer homework. Given the political climate of the mid-1980s, that seemed unlikely. This could change, however. Gil Gordon, an ex-Johnson and Johnson personnel man turned telecommuting consultant, correctly warns against using telecommuting to bargain down workers’ pay or bust up organizing drives.
“There’s nothing new about shift work, piecework, which is what pay per line of information is,” says Karen Nussbaum, president of 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women. “Or pay by keystroke homework. That’s a step back into the Middle Ages, if you ask me, and into the cottage industries.”[62]
A difference exists, after all, between creative jobs, like Hewes’s, and those that, in any setting, will be drudge work. The question is Where will the typing, the data entry, the other labor, be more palatable—home or normal office? And ideally that’s a worker-by-worker, company-by-company, decision. Perhaps some workerswill eventually strike for therightto telecommute. In fact, Glenn E. Watts, president of the Communications Workers of America, while frowning on electronic scabbing, once said that telecommuters might even plug into union gatherings. Union opposition to telecommuting could very well change. The big variable is whether companies will follow Gil Gordon’s wise advice not to use telecommuting as a union-busting ploy.
Of course, presently, home work isn’t for all. Today a telecommuter can’t make steel, cars, or refrigerators by remote control. He or she can’t cook a Big Mac, sweep a floor, run a supermarket checkout, or load a truck; for telecommuting is now strictly the province of white-collar workers and professionals. Indeed, companies in predominantly blue-collar fields may decide that certain office jobs just defy wiring in. Suppose an auto worker suffers a series of late paychecks. Will a payroll clerk sitting in a comfortable suburban home be as responsive as he might be dealing with the man face-to-face?
Even in basically white-collar fields, some bosses and employers may look askance at universal telecommuting.
Some, for instance, may miss the hints of body language, the blink of an eye, the tapping feet, the little, subtle signs that many people feel to “read” friend and foe. Others simply missseeingpeople hard at work. A Seattle hospital administrator, a telecommuter supervising two others working at home, says: “It ultimately comes down to an honor system.”[63]
So if you don’t trust your underlings and can’t objectively measure their output, you’d better keep your workers at the office and watch for eye blinks.
Not that every employee will want to telecommute, anyway. Management Recruiters International, Inc. asked six thousand people if they’d be willing to telecommute several days a week. Only 36 percent said they would. That’s still an impressive percentage, and it will grow as more people appreciate telecommuting’s virtues and it becomes more socially acceptable, but there’ll always be skeptics like Jack Smith.[64]
He’s a columnist with theLos Angeles Times, which once freed him of his commute. After six weeks, however, his granddaughter broke his typewriter, and he temporarily returned to the newspaper, where he rediscovered the joys of face-to-face contact and decided to remain. His columns perked up. He had missed “the friendlyfaces, fresh in the morning; the clothes; the gossip; the flirtations; the benign conspiracies; lunch-hour expeditions; the open forums on war and peace, Reaganomics, and the Rams quarterback controversy, none of which could be examined with such reckless spontaneity by anything canned for consumption on your home computer.”
“He realized that he really came back to the office not just to write but to renew his interaction with human life,” says William Renfro, a Washington consultant.[65]
Then again, Maxine Messinger, a gossip columnist with the HoustonChronicle, writes happily on a computer at home and brags that she hasn’t been to the office in years.
“For a long time it’s been far more efficient for me to work at home,” says another confirmed telecommuter, Hollis Vail, a part-time management consultant with the U.S. Geological Survey.
“I use my computer for writing, reports, and sending reports and messages,” he says, “and I can get all the data I want from the system.” The U.S. Geological Survey has thousands of people using electronic mail, and Vail can even hold conferences over the wire and record the results on his computer disks. Then he can sum them up. In fact, he can electronically cut and paste to produce policy documents reflecting many viewpoints.
David Snyder, now a professional futurist and consultant, fondly remembers the computerized conferences of his days as an Internal Revenue Service official. “I wrote a book with eight other people,” he says, “and we didn’t meet until it was written. It was a much better product because we could work that way. The travel would have been too expensive. And the mails would have been too much of a delay.” The coauthors left their contributions in each other’s electronic mailboxes for perusal and change. Back then Snyder was on a government computer, but later he hooked up an Apple in his Maryland home; he was planning to connect with aunts, uncles, and other members of his extended family, nationwide, who, together, do consulting and produce films. “You can’t have a mom-and-pop steel mill,” he said. “You can have a mom-and-pop information factory.”
Rank Xerox, the office equipment giant’s joint venture in England, is helping to pave the way for Mom and Pop.
It’s letting managers and other professionals telecommute. They’re no longer salaried, and they give up pensions and perks like company cars; but the “networkers,” as they’re called, normally sign two-year contracts guaranteeing them work at least two days a week. Business with other companies may take up theremaining days. In a sense the Rank Xerox program could be a large corporation’s version of the hundred-hour-a-month arrangement that Jeremy Hewes worked out with the computer magazine.
“Clearly,” says Derek Hornby, staff support director and a member of the Rank Xerox policy committee, “we need and will always have a ‘core’ staff within the head office for day-to-day management. Many functions, however, can be fulfilled by networkers.”[66]
Computer work, pension advising, management training, even putting out the company newsletter, are some of the tasks with which the networkers may help core staffers. Who qualifies for the program? Someone the company wants to keep but whose services it needs only part time. The first networker, Roger Walker, a former personnel manager in his late thirties, helped cut costs in the most direct way, eliminating his job. He was planning, anyway, to venture out on his own. But the Rank Xerox program eased the transition.
“What do you answer,” I asked the company, “when people say, ‘Isn’t this really just an outplacement scheme?’”
“The rough cost of someone going networking,” said Phil Judkins, a Rank Xerox spokesman in London, “is approximately three times the cost of their compensation if they were simply declared redundant by Rank Xerox.”
More than a year into the program, how were the volunteers doing?
“Extremely well,” said Judkins—all of them. He said two networkers seemed “well on the way to one-million-dollar turnover companies.”
And Rank Xerox, needless to say, didn’t supply all that business.
Along the way the corporation was benefiting from the useful business contacts that the new entrepreneurs were making outside the company. Sensibly, it discounted its model 820 microcomputer for the networkers. They could not only do their normal work but help show off a company product.
Runaway expenses, though, especially rent, were the real spur behind the experiment.
The rent on Rank Xerox’s international headquarters, in London, had doubled in just two years. Small wonder, then, that Rank Xerox wanted to trim every speck of gristle from its headquarters budget. And by late 1983 the knife seemed to be slicing well. The forty-three networkers were helping Rank Xerox save a third ofa million dollars a year in office space. Judkins said: “We have rid our books of this sterile expense.”
In the United States, Mike Bell, Xerox real estate executive, is busy toting up the advantages of another form of telecommuting—moving some corporate operations out of expensive downtown areas.
“Why should a company have row after row of workers taking up desk space in back rooms in large cities,” he says, “when it could modernize its office machinery and farm them out to offices in the suburbs? An average office worker and his desk take up 200 square feet at $20 a foot in big cities. That’s $4,000 a year just for rent. Suppose you could move him to a suburb with rent at $12 a square foot. Then rent would be only $2,400 a year.”
If the employee was in a suburban office tied in to headquarters via a computer-telephone hook-up, you might save as much as $3,000 over five years—even if you counted expenses like equipment costs.[67]
And you might save $8,200 per employee over a five year period if the workers were at home.
The chart below assumes that (1) each employee takes up 200 square feet, including corridor, aisle, and file space, (2) the downtown rent is $20 a square foot, which is perhaps half of some Manhattan rents, (3) the suburban rent is $12 a square foot, (4) you pay home workers $4 a square foot in rent, (5) your investment in equipment for each telecommuter is $4,000, (6) the effective tax rate is 35 percent, (7) you’ll receive a tax credit of ten percent of the computer gear’s initial cost and (8) depreciation is straight line over five years. Yes, $4,000 is more than the computers might each cost; the inflated figure helps fudge for miscellaneous expenses like moving expenses and phone bills. As for tax laws, they can change. But the credit—as distinguished from depreciation—accounts for only a tiny fraction of the money you’re saving. One last point: the chart below doesn’t consider interest on what you’d be saving in rent.
Large companies, of course, could mix different forms of telecommuting and employment arrangements. They might even let some workers shift back and forth. Some employees, some of the time, anyway, would work at home, while others might be at companies’ regional or neighborhood telecommuting centers of one kind or another.
Jack Nilles’s kind of neighborhood center—at least one of the kinds he’s proposed—would be organized by corporate function. One center would bring all the accountants together, for instance,
ACOMPARISONCOMPARISONOF OFFICE EXPENSES PER WORKERCASE 1: DOWNTOWN OFFICEYears012345TotalRent04,0004,0004,0004,0004,00020,000Tax Reduction at 35% Rate0-1,400-1,400-1,400-1,400-1,400-7,000Total Expenses02,6002,6002,6002,6002,60013,000CASE 2: SUBURBAN OFFICEYears012345TotalRent02,4002,4002,4002,4002,40012,000Tax Reduction at 35% Rate0-840-840-840-840-840-4,200Investment4,000000004,000Tax Credit-40000000-400Depreciation Credit0-280-280-280-280-280-1,400Total Expenses3,6001,2801,2801,2801,2801,28010,000CASE 3: HOME OFFICEYears012345TotalRent08008008008008004,000Tax Reduction at 35% Rate0-280-280-280-280-280-1,400Investment4,000000004,000Tax Credit-40000000-400Depreciation Credit0-280-280-280-280-280-1,400Total Expenses3,6002402402402402404,800
and another would house a company’s public relations department. This idea does have the important advantage of, say, letting accountants pore over their electronic ledgers in each other’s company. Yet what about the unlucky ones who lived in suburbs across town?[68]
They would prefer, presumably, the kind of center propounded by Richard C. Harkness, a former professor at the University of Washington who later joined Satellite Business Systems.
Under the Harkness plan, an employee would go to the center closest to his home. “He might even walk there,” Harkness says.According to him, a large company might have as many neighborhood centers as elementary schools—leasing offices for individual workers or small groups. Imagine a professional building with a real estate agency next to a stockbroker, a doctor across the hall from a commodities trader. Well, that’s how it would be in a building housing neighborhood centers, except a sign outside a suite might say “General Motors” rather than “Dr. Pearlman.” Of course a company might instead have fewer centers and lease whole floors. Stepping off the elevator, you’d see the foot-high letters reminding you you were in GM territory. Workers would benefit from the companionship of perhaps several dozen colleagues, quick access to secretarial and copying services, and similar support.
“My way is more radical than locating people by jobs,” says Harkness, “since an accountant could be in one place and his boss in another.” Computer networks would maintain entire organizations; a whole new branch of management science would develop to hone procedures to manage telecommuters. Perhaps the day will come when IBM will endow Harvard Business School with a telecommuting chair.
A third form of neighborhood center would be a munytel, as I’ll call it—a municipally or privately run center with terminals capable of linking up with many companies’ equipment. Individual employees, not companies, might rent munytel offices.
Munytels would not bolster employees’ corporate loyalties; but some companies wouldn’t care, favoring other ways.[69]
Munytels, moreover, could be ideal for free-lance telecommuters who valued a clear line between home and office. Workers would be at these neighborhood centers all the time or whenever they preferred and space was available. Fed up temporarily with toiling alongside a sullen spouse at home? Then you’d flee to a munytel, unless your free-lance work involved confidential company information; in which case you might drive to a GM or Prudential suite with a spare terminal.
Neighbors with similar or complementary skills might gather at munytels and pool resources to seek contracts from large companies. Why not use computerized lists to bring together people in the first place? “Neighborhood work centers could themselves become employers, selling clerical or professional services to other organizations,” said one of the consultants working with Harknesson a landmark telecommuting study for the Stanford Research Institute in the late 1970s.
Munytels, in addition, could be drop-off points for messengers from corporations’ headquarters. They would deliver printed material—books, for instance—that companies couldn’t flash across the screens of telecommuters at home and munytels.
Also, and perhaps just as important, munytels could serve as informal neighborhood clubs.
They could offer food and drink and a chance to mix electronically transmitted gossip with the face-to-face kind. “Meet me,” a stock suggestion might go, “at the munytel.”
Moreover, for telecommuters unable to handle their children and jobs simultaneously, the munytels might provide child care. And in poor neighborhoods, the munytels could combine work facilities with training.
The prefiasco Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago, despite its bad luck with “problem loans,” did some enlightened work in this field. It experimented with a word-processing center twenty-five miles away at a community college. The bank used it for both training and actual bank work, a logical combination; the students have learned on equipment similar to what they would use on the job, not simply the obsolete machinery that many schools must skimp along with. Corporations, encouraged by tax breaks or government subsidies, might together establish munytels in poorerneighborhoodsneighborhoods.[70]They would provide the businesslike surroundings that some workers might prefer over home offices in slums or public housing projects.
Munytels would beoneresponse to some thoughtful criticisms of telecommuting made by Janice C. Blood, 9 to 5’s information director.
“If you’re a secretary earning $11,000 a year,” she says, “will your employer build you an addition for your computer room? Even a small Apple wouldn’t be too attractive an addition to my living room.”
Blood is also worried about the cost of the equipment itself, asking, “Should someone get a cut in salary just because her boss gets [her] a new typewriter?”
More likely, however, clerical workers instead would receivesomemore money for turning out a lot more work. Whatever the case, munytels could be a solution to the equipment issue—inaddition to the obvious one of company-supplied computers in various cases.
But workers should still be free to use their own terminals. Remember Hollis Vail’s preference forhisprinter?
He’s right. I could never stomach working all day on, say, one of the older Apple IIs, which some companies may still use as their universal microcomputer. My Kaypro’s keyboard has a silkier feel. The screen is more viewable than many Apple monitors, and I’m a confirmed WordStar addict. Even if voice commands become the norm, I may well be among the last of the keyboard diehards. And yet, were I telecommuting, it wouldn’t matter. A corporate computer would care about the right series and speeds of bytes, not how they originated. So I might be able to keep using my electronic equivalent of a buggy whip.
Just about anybody, moreover, will be able to afford ausefulsmall computer before the end of the century—because sooner or later one will be cheaper than today’s typicalTVsets. Flat screens and keyboards will sell for a pittance as mass production and robotics drive down costs. So much for that one of Blood’s arguments.
As for her fear of an Apple system cluttering up her living room—well, the home computer of tomorrow will probably be smaller and better looking. Or it’ll be part of yourTV. If not? You may hide your equipment in a handsome, wooden cabinet that will convert to a genuinely ergonomic table of adjustable height. No, I don’t know of a product like that now. But already stores in trendy Yuppie areas are springing up with names like “Computer Support,” and some of their offerings may be as fit for your living room as for your office.
Less easily answered, however, is Blood’s worry of “a Mae West employment profile”—broad at the top, narrow at the middle, wide at the bottom. That is, there might be lush job opportunities near the top around the equivalent of Mae’s bust. A few senior managers could electronically monitor the masses toiling at home—could count and time their keystrokes.
But between the top people and the ones entering the data, companies would need many fewer run-of-the-mill supervisors.
And that would pinch off some promotion opportunities for the clerical workers.
In some ways, however, companies might make nonsupervisory work more palatable. They might, for instance, pay clerks not by individuals’ keystrokes but by those of small “telegroups,” where peer pressure would keep every member productive.
Also, companies might follow the example of Volvo, the Swedishautomaker, and rotate some workers’ tasks. Some numbers crunchers might swap assignments with word-processing people. Indeed, companies could pay extra for versatility. Word-processing work today is sometimes more complicated than regular typing; but that might not always be so, and corporations could relieve some of the boredom of repetitious jobs simply by letting employees exchange them.
Still another legitimate worry is the distribution of the economic benefits of telecommuting. What’s to prevent employers from abuse of the piecework payment system if the government lets it become the norm? Could piecework be just a gimmick to help impersonally squeeze the last drop of blood from the clerical telecommuters? Is telecommuting a mean-spirited or enlightened response to the day-care problem? I suspect some companiesaremean spirited. Not all. But some. Ideally, however, this won’t deprive society of telecommuting’s benefits. Munytels, after all, could help solve the child-care problem, and changes in the labor laws could guarantee the fairness of the piecework system for all. Existing ones do cover clerks doing piecework. They must, for instance, keep time records to show they’re collecting the equivalent of the minimum wage.
In a related matter, a controversy was swirling in 1984 around a 42-year-old federal ban on commercial home knitting—an issue of interest to companies considering telecommuting. Unions were fighting for the ban; the Reagan administration, for courts to overturn it.[71]Perhaps the Reaganites would wantnorestrictions on corporate use of telecommuters, which is unfortunate considering the opportunities for electronic sweatshops, of which the sleazy will certainly want to avail themselves. Ideally, either (1) I’m wrong about the Reaganites or (2) future administrations will take a more enlightened attitude.
Telecommuting also has energy implications—good ones. With widespread telecommuting, oil price increases would no longer be so scary if another energy crisis threatened the United States.
Jack Nilles once calculated that the typical computer terminal uses less than 125 watts, and a phone line takes up no more than a watt. Then he matched those figures against a private automobile’s typical energy use during commutes, and he found that telecommuting would have a twenty-nine-to-one energy advantage. Compared to mass transit systems loaded to capacity—a rarity in most American cities—it would still enjoy two-to-onesuperiority. With ten million telecommuters, the country might save three-quarters of a billion gallons of gasoline a year.[72]
“At least in the United States,” notes Richard Harkness, “commuting accounts for 35 percent of all auto and truck fuel consumption.” Much, maybe even most, of the thirty-five percent would be trips to jobs convertible to telecommuting.[73]
Ticking off statistics, Harkness illustrates the profligacy of American energy consumption. “The average U.S. worker commutes about twenty miles each day. Eighty-four percent of those commutes are by automobile, 65 percent with only the driver. Two hundred and twenty million Americans consume 18 million barrels of oil per day, roughly 30 percent of the world’s supply.” He also notes the cost of America maintaining forty thousand miles of superhighways and 4 million miles of streets and roads. “It has been estimated,” says Harkness, “that 248,500 U.S. bridges need major repairs at a cost of $47 billion.”
And beyond the energy and financial prices, what about the psychological ones? Even part-time telecommuters can greatly reduce the stress on their nerves and schedules, perhaps lowering medical costs for society. “An employee who drives an hour to work would save sixteen hours in commuting time each month, or the equivalent of two eight-hour workdays, by working at home two days a week,” says Frank W. Schiff, a Washington economist.[74]
Even battle-scarred urbanites with short commutes might relish the chance to work at home two days out of five. Skyscrapers and their occupants keep hogging downtowns, aggravating congestion and tension; and a taxi trip of just a dozen blocks in New York City can take a half an hour at lunchtime.
In Houston, meanwhile, some gun-toting commuters are literally murdering each other, saying in effect: “Your right of way or your life!” Jon Verboon, aHouston Chroniclereporter who has worked the police beat, told me, “It’s not uncommon for shots to be exchanged between motorists who are hacked off at each other”—sometimes over right of ways. An accident needn’t have occurred.
Motorists killed more conventionally on the way to work, of course, are a hefty percentage of the fifty thousand yearly highway fatalities. But how could a telecommuter die? Electrocution? Cutting his wrists on a broken video tube? Forgetting about the ratherunlikely radiation risks—which flat screens would reduce if these dangers existed—computers needn’t be lethal like cars.
By converting to telecommuting, then, companies in the end might save employees’ lives as well as energy and money.
Firms making the transition would do well to consider what will be in the data base into which the telecommuters would tap. The range of requirements is as wide as the range of business activities. A good data base for telecommuters, however, isn’t that different from the ones that some managers are already using by way of terminals on site. Here are the traits:
1. Ease and speed of use. You needn’t be a computer expert or wrestle with inconveniences like dialing fifteen-digit numbers to reach the main computer. The system explains itself on screen if you want it to, though experienced users can switch off the menus when they’re ready. You ideally don’t have to wade through an instruction manual. The system tells you when you’re tapping out wrong commands. Also, it’s fast. You can start using it in a hurry, and you don’t have to wait more than a few seconds at the most for it to respond to your commands. And you constantly feel in control. You can easily search through the data base for the informationyouwant.
2. Friendliness. A good system isn’t just easy to use; it’s also boy scout polite, sprinkling its prompts with “Thanks yous” and avoiding intimidating terms like “illegal information request.” Commit a careless mistake on some data bases and they’ll throw back lawyerish words suggesting you’re on the verge of a jury indictment.
3. Reliability. The system doesn’t lose information.
4. Confidentiality. Clerks aren’t privy to the same information as the company president.
Indeed, basically, the same traits would be ideal for some other kinds of software, especially the kind governing the operation ofnetworks. That’s the term for the hardware and software that lets machines talk to each other. A network can be alocal network, linking machines within the same office, or it can be national or even global. Someday, if they haven’t already, Bell and other companies may develop software especially meant for corporate networks of telecommuters.
While widespread telecommuting isn’t yet a reality, Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz have come as close as anyone to realizing its full benefits. They live in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and as they’re fond of pointing out, “We don’t commute. We telecommute.” They communicate routinely with business associates around the countryand find electronic mail a boon to late risers on the West Coast with contacts and friends back East. By the time I reached them, they felt liked caged animals inside a media zoo. The papers had leaped at the opportunity to write about a certified electronic cottage. Peter and Trudy had even ended up in a BBC documentary on computers and the future—a vivid contrast tobesuitedbesuited, tied scientists shown in antiseptic laboratories.
“We’re the hippie couple,” joked Trudy. “Peter’s the one with the beard.”
But they’re hardly refugees from the old Haight-Ashbury; Peter is a former statistical analyst, and Trudy helped run a rural education program after a few years as a high school teacher.
Today they’re hooked into the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES), a national computer network set up by Murray Turoff, one of the world’s leading experts on networking. Through EIES they’ve done research on telecommuting for projects funded by the National Science Foundation. They help colleges, nonprofit organizations, and others set up computer networks. Indeed, “on line,” they even met partners in the business they started to refine and promote a new software system called MIST. That stands for Microcomputer Information Support Tools. One of MIST’s many features can help your computer stay in touch with others—send electronic mail, for instance, or pick the brains of a micro with a big data base.
“P + T,” as they sign their computer messages, had been on line since 1977, and it seemed right to ask them for advice on making small business contacts through networks. Peter couldn’t talk that evening, the victim of a temperamental printer, but Trudy offered these suggestions, among others:
1. Whatever network you’re on, see if there’s a directory grouping subscribers by interest. Which match yours?
“You can send a hello message saying, ‘This is who I am. Now tell me something about you.’” This electronic mail could simultaneously reach a number of selected subscribers. Then, for instance, two stockbrokers, in New York and Washington, could exchange financial and regulatory gossip. Other small businessmen might simply discuss common problems. The Source and a rival network,CompuServe,CompuServe,each boast well over sixty thousand subscribers; so, obviously you do have a good chance of reaching the right people, at least if they’re professionals or well-off. With customers typically earning $50,000 or more, The Source isn’t the way to catch up with welfare mothers.
2. “You must take risks,” Trudy warns. “You must be able to askstrangers if they can help you. There are different levels of getting to know people for business purposes.”
If you’re looking for a business partner for a major venture, for instance, don’t rely just on electronic communications. Talk on the phone before you team up; meet him. But Trudy says networks are fine for minor transactions. “We’ve written papers with people we’ve never met,” she says, “and we worked with Turoff for two years before we met him face to face.”
3. Tap out your messages knowing that people cannot see your expression or hear inflections in your voice.
“You may even want to type‘Chuckle,’”‘Chuckle,’”Trudy says, “if it’s something where you’re being sarcastic or ironic.” Of course the written word has advantages. “You can ask people questions and say things without confronting them directly,” she says. What better way to brainstorm wildly?
I’ll add other advice: try electronic bulletin boards. They work, believe me, at least on computer-related topics. Jeremy Hewes, for instance, reached me through The Source, which, at my request, had given me a demonstration account, a blush, electronic equivalent of a press junket.
“Hello,” she tapped out after seeing my note on a bulletin board for IBM owners. “Here are a few thoughts for your book on telecommuting and related matters.”
We followed through by phone—but The Source paved the way.
And we could just as well have been those two stockbrokers swapping gossip electronically. It’s a distinct possibility, since half The Source subscribers use the service in full- or part-time occupations.
Don’t, incidentally, give up making electronic business contacts just because you can’t afford The Source or other brand-name services. Discount, no-frills networks will be springing up without, say, stockmarket reports. Check out prices. Experiment. Get on a service for a trial if the connect charges aren’t formidable and see if you’re meeting your kind of people. A network, in that sense, is just like a bar.
Also consider local boards for which you don’t even have to pay long-distance charges.
John Fuller phoned after I “tacked up” a notice on a board for Heath owners around Washington, D.C. Rainer Malitzke-Goes, an employee with a large communications satellite company and an invaluable source of technical information, reached me through another local board. Our computers, however, can also talk directly,without a board or network, so I’ll check some technical details in this chapter by zipping it to him electronically.
Besides helping you make business contacts, your computer can ferret out facts in a hurry.
Want to see if anyone else has started a dog kennel specializing in Afghans? Well, a magazine article or abstract, stashed away in a computer two thousand miles away, may tell you. Just dial up the right information service. For a listing of data banks by subject, consultInformation Industry Market Place, published by Bowker, 205 East 42nd St., New York, N.Y. 10017.
People living in small towns without good libraries will find electronic data bases especially useful.
A Tennessee doctor, Frederick Myers, spent two and one-half hours on the road when he periodically went to a medical library sixty miles away. Now his microcomputers bring him Medline. It’s one of the hundreds of data bases available through Dialog, the giant information service in Palo Alto, California. Myers toldPersonal Computingthat Medline let him “do in ten minutes what it would take me hours to do at the library going through the hardbound indexes.” His patients have benefited. While a patient in the emergency room lay with stabbing wounds in his stomach, Myers ferreted out relevant abstracts via Medline.
Electronic data bases don’t just save time. With them you can pick up odds and ends of information that printed indexes might not bring out.
Suppose you want to know which celebrities have endorsed electric toothbrushes on television and, searching manually, you don’t find anything in the toothbrush articles. What next? Well, the data banks’ indexes might cover even one-paragraph mentions of electric toothbrushes—little references in articles about advertising or about the VIP toothbrush endorsers.
But beware. Electronic information services and data bases can cost up to hundreds of dollars an hour to use. You need to know what to tell the data bases to spew out the facts you need. And that can take time. Luckily, some companies have developed programs that let you map out your strategy off-line instead of giving commands while the ticker is running. One, called In-Search, runs on IBM-style micros, and can save you thousands of dollars over the years if you’re a heavy Dialog user. Even at $399 In-Search would seem worth it.
I can appreciate this all too well, having squandered $35 in a few minutes trying to tap Dialog for my “Jewels that Blip” chapter. An experienced librarian at a public library operated a terminal for me there. And yet at the time even she could find next to nothing on crimesagainstmicrocomputers. In-Search might havesaved much—and maybe even most—of the $35.
Under the circumstances, in fact, I would better have spent the $35 on long-distance calls to the right authorities, which is what I did. Information services aren’t panaceas. Most of this book comes from old-fashioned print and interviews.
My work habits will change, however, as more people tap into data bases and the costs decline; I’ll be very selfish and put in a good word for Dialog and the rest, hoping eventually to share these economies of scale!